New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Vernacular languages can remain unused for literate purposes for either technical or societal reasons. Technical reasons would include lack of a writing system, or of a standardized spelling system, or of lingustic descriptions that would allow ready development of these. Societal reasons would include the demographic and structural and political characteristics of the community, the legal status and political and economic affiliations of its languages, the attitudes towards them of members of the society, the educational processes, and the availability of literacy instruction. In this chapter we seek to identify the contexts that might be concucive to the vernacularization of literacy by focusing on the society interfaces between literacy and vernacular languages.